Hebrews 11 - Part 5 — Leonard Ravenhill

You, brothers at the back, you came from Lubbock? Very good, very welcome. Brother from Arkansas, his wife? Good. Anybody from then? Who's from then? Oh, you are now, you live there, good. You're still welcome.

We're going to have a carload from where? Jimmy's Faggots School tonight. I don't know whether they got lost or they're fearful. Hebrews 11, OK. We put these mics on, these amplifiers anyhow. I hope they're not too loud, are they?

Faith as an Active Response to God

Good. OK, let's say one or two things. Repetition is a law of learning. And so we have to learn every week. Remember, this epistle is written to Christians only. We, we, we. Nobody else. Not to sinners.

Again, it's not addressed like the other epistles in the first, usually in the first chapter. It's addressed in the third chapter in verse one, verse, yes, verse one of chapter three. Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the apostle and high priest of our profession, Jesus Christ, our Christ Jesus, who was faithful to him that appointed him.

Going back to the 11th chapter now. Remember, we've said that this word faith occurs no less than 300 times in the New Testament, only twice in the Old Testament. See, we talk about faith, they acted it.

We're going to have to come back to acting faith. Let me go back again a moment here into the second chapter. And this again, remember, is written to believers. We ought to give the more earnest things to the thing we have heard, lest we let them slip.

If the word spoken by angels was steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense and reward, how shall we escape? If we neglect so great salvation, how great is it? Well, the next verse tells you, or the same verse.

At the first it began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him, God also bearing them witness with signs and wonders and divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost. That's how great the salvation is.

And anything less than that is not the gospel. We've gradually diminished it and diminished it. The liberals don't believe the Bible, and some of the fundamentalists say dispensationally, oh, well, that's for another day.

That's a nice cop-out, isn't it, for failure. But God says, I'm the same yesterday and forever. Jesus said, and God says, I am the Lord, I change not. He hasn't changed, sin hasn't changed, so who has changed?

The church, obviously, or those who profess to be the church. So in this chapter, okay, verse, chapter 11, the first person named here is, by faith, Abel. Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain.

Abel, Enoch, and Noah: Worship, Walking, and Working

So here we have Abel worshipping. If he sacrificed, he made an altar. We used to go to a fellowship sometime, and the pastor would say, now, come on, everybody, get up and come to the front, come to the front.

The fire always falls on the altar. The fire never falls on the altar. The fire falls on the sacrifice. You can have an altar, doesn't matter what kind of an altar you want. The fire falls on the sacrifice.

And Abel, I don't know whether he had a lot of cattle or not, but anyhow, he got an offering. His brother's offering, I'm sure, looked a lot nicer. It wasn't bloody, but it was from the ground, and the ground was cursed, and man was cursed.

And so he tried to bring a cursed thing to God as an offering, and God said no. So we have, first of all, we have Abel, and he's there because he worshipped. The second character is Enoch, and we remember him because he walked.

Now, why do we stress it always so much? Enoch walked with God. Abraham walked with God. Noah walked with God. But you see, the consuming thing about Enoch was he walked with God. And we talk about the Christian life.

Ruth Paxson has a book on Ephesians, The Wealth, The Walk, and Warfare. I don't have that. Anybody have it? If you do, if you want to give it away, I know somebody who would like it. But that's what it is, the wealth, the walk, and the warfare of the Christian.

So Abel is there because he worshipped. Enoch is there because he walked. And now we come to who? Noah, in verse 7. And he's there because he what? He worked. Faith, again, without works is dead. Remember again, we reminded you that here in the previous chapter, chapter 10, and verse 11 is a verse that's used so often, a kind of a threatening verse, to the unbeliever.

But it's written to us, it's written to believers. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Robert Louis Stevenson said there's only one thing more fearful and that's for you to fall out of the hands of the living God and he won't bother with us, either as individuals or nations.

It's going to be a fearful thing at a judgment seat. Terrifying majesty. Glory beyond anything we can ever comprehend. By faith, Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet. Well, isn't that what faith's all about?

About things not seen, and you see them as real, as though they were vividly in front of us? Because he was wooed with fear, he prepared an ark to the saving of his house, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness, which is by faith.

Noah’s Holiness in a Corrupt Generation

Now let's go back into Genesis here. What's the chapter 6, I think? Yeah, Genesis chapter 6. Let's read from verse 5, or verse 4. There were giants in the earth in those days. And also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and their then children, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was very great in the earth, and that every imagination and thought of his heart was evil continually. Now emphasize that, every thought. Every thought. Every thought without interruption was evil continually.

Every thought only without mixture. Every thought was evil without interruption. Every thought was totally maximum impurity. It was only evil. And it was wickedness, evil without intermission. It was continuous.

It wasn't a case of, you know, you see a graph sometimes of the wicked... something's like this, and then it shows you something going down, then nothing down. I don't believe that's what happened here.

I believe the wickedness of man began on this level, and it just went up, and up, and up. It didn't come down at all. It increased in intensity. It became more and more diabolical. And yet a holy God, whose eyes are holier than to behold iniquity, saw this in the creation that he had made.

He repented God, verse 6. He repented the law that he had made man on the earth. And it grieved him at his heart. Now how in the world do you interpret the grief of God? Huh? We're such a flippant crowd.

Jesus wouldn't be comfortable in most of our meetings. We're too gay, we're too happy. And by gay I mean frivolous. Jesus was a man of sorrows. And Paul says at the end of the journey to Timothy, be sober, be sober, be sober.

The emphasis now is be silly, be joyful. The emphasis is not holiness, it's happiness. And yet God is wanting more and more holiness of his people. Verse 7, the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have made on the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air.

And it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. That takes me back. I remember as a boy climbing up a bank in a town called Doncaster. I didn't know what was on the other side.

I climbed up the bank and there was a lily, a big gorgeous lily open on a lake that was covered with scum. I've never forgotten it. It showed up in its beauty by the scum around it. And here Noah shows up in his holiness by the hellishness of those around him.

He shows his consecration in the midst of all the corruption. And it says, concerning this man Noah, listen to how God graduates this man. Noah was a just man, number one. Number two, perfect. Number three, and he walked with God.

And in chapter seven, verse one, the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. One man. Only one man. Surrounded by a multitude that no man has numbered.

Some people have said there were millions. I don't know how they come to that conclusion. But the fact was, in the midst of all that corruption, he wasn't contaminated. He wasn't intimidated. He shoved the whole thing off.

It's of the devil. It's not of God. It's not pure. It's perverted. It's polluted. And he shrank from it. He hated the thing. Because he had the nature of God. And God hates it. And he hated it. And so God says to him, The end of all flesh, verse thirteen, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth was filled with violence through them, and I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee an ark of gopher wood. Verse fifteen, This is a fashion which thou shalt make of it. The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits. Do you know how long that is? Four hundred and fifty feet.

That's quite a boat. One, I think it's Dake in his notes on the Bible, says this was the greatest ship ever made until 1880 or something. No, he missed it. How many people were on that ship that Paul went across the Mediterranean on?

Three hundred and seventy-five. No first class, second class. All like cattle. That must have been a horrible trip. And yet look at the size of this boat. This is the length. This is the fashion thou shalt make of it.

The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits. The breadth, fifty cubits. The height, thirty cubits. So what do you have there? It's four hundred and fifty feet long, seventy feet wide, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high.

Well, if you work that out, the only it comes to? Fifty-six thousand two hundred and fifty cubic yards, not feet. A hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty cubic feet. Boy, that's some ship.

And the Lord told him to get all the cattle in and then he says take all your food. They weren't going to stop shopping. Oh, people say, oh that ark, boy it must be stinking in that ark. You know, I don't believe it had one polluted smell in it at all.

Some have typified it as a type of the millennium because the animal, the lion didn't need the lamb. There was perfect harmony. He was how long building it? Do you remember? How many years? A hundred and twenty.

Okay, a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty years, that's right. How many days was that? Forty-three thousand eight hundred. How many hours? Boy, I got a computer years before anybody. She came with me tonight.

I just said Martha, work that out. So she worked it out. It's forty-three thousand eight hundred days. It's one and a half million hours. And God said he looked down from heaven for one and a half million hours.

You know how quickly we forget? They knew the story of Abel. Abel had slain the, whatever, he slew a lamb and shed blood. But God looks down on these people. The question in my mind, how many people helped him to build this ark?

Didn't I think it was? It's not a bit like the thing you buy in a, you know, Toys R Us or something. It wasn't a boat at all. It didn't have a sail, it didn't have a motor. Where was it sailing? It wasn't sailing anywhere.

It wasn't made to sail, it was made to float. My father had a piece of gopher wood and it's very much like, what's that, wood that they make airplanes out of, the boys make airplanes. Bolster, like that, as light as that.

And this huge craft with all the animals of the world in it and all the people that God wanted to save were in it. I wonder how many of them helped him to build the ark. What do you think happened to Noah?

Don't you think everybody said, you know that old crackpot? Oh, let's take the grandchildren. They haven't seen this crazy old guy. Oh, we've seen him for years. It's going to rain. Remember, they'd never seen rain.

There'd never been rain. God had watered the earth. We sang it tonight. You notice that? Drop thy still dews of quietness. Do you know when the dew falls? When there's no wind. You never get dew when there's a wind.

And so he says, drop thy still dews of quietness. In other words, let's all be quiet before him and he'll drop his dew upon us. Or take time to be holy, if you want to, in some other language of a hymn.

We don't have time for that. Everything's in a hurry. Particularly in America, we're so fast with everything, aren't we? One had finished something yesterday instead of tomorrow. But these men helped to build the ark.

I don't believe it was... I believe it was just a floating lug cabin. So don't think America had the first of them. It must have been... They didn't saw it into planks and whatnot. Why should they? I believe that they just put those lugs together and somehow cemented it, whatever they did with the cracks in between.

Or maybe it swelled up and... I remember going to an auction in Ireland and there's a wonderful barrel there about this height, I don't know, a hundred gallons, and the ribs are about, oh, a quarter of an inch apart.

And a friend of mine, he bid frantically to get it. I said, the thing won't hold a gallon of water. He said, it will in a few hours. You keep filling it, the wood swells and it swells and it swells. It'll be a perfect barrel tomorrow.

And I went to see and it was. Then I knew why he had a PhD. But how the Lord made provision in this ark. You can do so much. I do the rest. He put one window in the ark and it was at the top. I remember some years ago I went to have a crusade down in Trinidad.

They'd just put up a wonderful building. The Queen of England opened it and this Englishman preached right after that. But she left, unfortunately. But it's built like two saucers and there's a space.

There are no windows, so while you're preaching the birds come in and it's a great time. And I believe the ark was like that. It had no glass windows as we think of. But it had a door in the side. And it had a window in the side.

And how David being so sharp. Bless his heart. He said, you know, I'd had a window. No, the window's in the roof and the door's in the side. If the window had been at the side no one would have seen all the corruption sailing past and God would let him look on that defilement.

And yet you have the ark made just for a choice number of people. I think for years they scorned him and cursed him and ridiculed him and said, Ray, he says the waters are going to break up from the ground and waters are going to come down from above and meet and flood.

You see, that's why the ark, it was made to float, it would rise. And there's no notice here of any storm, any thunder. There must have been. I'm sure once the water started getting behind those rocks they started bouncing down the hillside and making a terrific crash.

Or on the other hand, maybe they had to stay there and watch that flood coming up. I imagine every beast that was there somebody jumped on its back to get out of the way. Climb the hills, get as high as you can.

And the silence was killing. It was just coming up like this, there's no way of stopping it. It's creeping up relentlessly, relentlessly. Suddenly they start screaming, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?

Finding and Doing the Will of God

For a hundred and twenty years. You see, there are two great things in life. Maybe there are more, but I've reduced them to two because I know you don't like to think too much. Okay. Two great things in life.

One is to find the will of God and the second more difficult thing is to do it when nobody else is doing it. The third thing you need is patience. It says in the tenth chapter to have patience. It says in the twelfth chapter, let us run with patience.

Noah built an ark for a hundred and twenty years. That's patience, isn't it? I wonder what kind of... Do you think the family had a row? Do you think there were arguments? I think if you've gone down to Noah and you heard him there with a saw working when you got near you'd say, there's something wrong.

I hear it. And it wasn't the saw, it was a groaning of his own spirit. He was building a coffin in one sense for the rest of the world. For him it was safety. For them it was destruction. And no man could enjoy that situation.

So he has a hundred and twenty years of grief. They were stony-hearted and rebellious. They enjoyed their defilement. They enjoyed their corruption. They totally... God looks down for a million and a half hours to see if there's an altar, a curling smoke.

Somebody's repented. Not one, not one. It was fashionable to be sinful like it is today. Total iniquity, total corruption. And yet Noah sticks it out. You notice this? Once he went in the ark he never came out again.

People may have said, Hey, come out old boy, you've been in there a while. He had been in a while. I think there's a scripture, I couldn't find it today, where it says that God didn't speak to him until the seventh day.

He lets him put the door... But he says there's one thing you can't do about that ark. You can't shut the door. When I shut it, no man will open it. When I open it, no man can shut it. And that's the thing we need to learn.

Revelation 3 says that. I'll open a door no man can shut. I'll close a door no man can open. And so he is in the ark of safety and the whole world is rocking round about and yet there's a deep, settled peace in his heart.

He's in the centre of the will of God. I think it's the same man that wrote that hymn that we sang tonight who says, The storm may roar without me, my heart may low be laid round about me and shall I be afraid?

Isaac Watts wrote to him that says, Let mountains from their seats be hurled down to the deeps and buried there. Convulsions shape this solid world our faith shall never yield to fear. In another he says, Let mountain walls confront thy way.

Why sit and weep? Arise and save. Be thou removed and they shall be by power of God cast in the sea. Be thou removed. Faith bid thee restart. For yonder sea arise, depart. I may, I can, I must, I will the purpose of my God fulfill.

What do you do with a man like that? No wonder Wesleyan enjoyed him. And that's such a concept of the majesty of God. I think I've always believed in the majesty of God and I believe in the sovereignty but this last year God showed me more the sovereignty of God in my own life.

In my own life. I've been very slow to learn, I know that. I listen to my boys and in the home or outside it's heavenly to be there. Their walk with God is so majestic. Anyhow these people are here. Verse 17 of that 6th chapter says, Behold I, even I do bring a flood of waters on the earth to destroy all flesh.

Where is the breath of life? From under heaven. And everything that is in the earth it shall die. But with thee I establish my covenant. Thou shalt come into the ark. Thou and thy sons and thy wife and thy son's wife with thee.

Now verse 21, Take thou unto thee all the food that is eaten that thou shalt gather it to thee. It shall be food for thee and for them. So anyhow there's the background. You've got a man laboring for a hundred and twenty years.

Listen, God isn't going to tell you what he tells that dear brother. Not tell him what he tells me. God says go work it out. Lord, how long? Do it till I say stop. When the ark is finished, that's okay.

So he goes and does it. A hundred and twenty years. You have need of patience to do the will of God. Let the other guy do what he likes. God is making me. He's not making Bob here. He's making Bob. He's not making us.

He's got a different design for us. A hundred and twenty years. We'll go on to, not now, we'll go on later to Abraham. He was 75 years when God called him. He was 175 when God finished with him. So cheer up, Bracey.

You've a long way to go. A hundred years for God to make a man. You know these young preachers come into my office. Boy, they get insulted. You know this kind of, when the older men come in, they talk about God.

When the young men come in, they want to tell me who they know, where they've preached, how many souls they've won, everything else. As though they'd turn the world upside down. It takes God twenty years at least to make a man.

And he says, Abraham, I'm going to work with you. We'll see all the obstructions. It takes a hundred and twenty years of patience looking from heaven. He's delighting the heart of God. I'm talking here of Noah.

He's doing everything according to the pattern. The world around is getting more corrupt. They have excursion parties coming around to mock him and saying, this clown talks about rain coming down. You know, I wrote a book, which God used, I'm glad.

Sodom had no Bible. I think I'll write another one. Sodom had its prophets. It had one. Why weren't these people alarmed? Why didn't somebody come in and say, I was shopping today to, you know, to a brother.

Hey, Jacob, whoever it was. Hey, you know that old man that goes down Main Street, looks, yelling, the Lord is coming with ten thousand of his. He's disappeared. And the police can't find him. Nobody can find him.

He's just vanished. Enoch. He had no Bible under his arm. He had a great advantage. He never went to a Bible school. To get his mind all messed up. He just walked with the Lord. And yet Enoch walked with God.

What's he saying? Can you imagine this fiery prophet going down the Main Street in Jerusalem or wherever it was? Where would it be? Sodom and Gomorrah? What's he saying? Enoch the seventh from Adam. Remember, there's another Enoch in between.

Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied saying, behold, the Lord cometh. How did he know the Lord was coming? Pardon? Sure. In a walk. Boy, I'd like to have been out behind the Lord and Enoch with a tape recorder, wouldn't you?

You know, the wonder about these men. In Israel, things were visible to them. I tell you, Cain built a city. Abraham looked for a city. John saw the city. The man of God sees things as really now as though they were actually in front of him.

And they're not this stupid thing they've got now of visualizing, is it? What do they call it? Visualizing. Again, I remind you about these fellows in Hebrew. They absolutely stagger me. I can't read it without tears.

What did they do? Let me run down it quickly. They subdued kingdoms. Wrought righteousness. Obtained promises. Stopped the mouths of lions. Women received their dead raised to life again. And not one of them ever had a Bible.

Dear God, what am I going to do at the judgment seat? I've got every word Almighty God is ever going to say. Every word. He doesn't write a PS at the end and say, Oh, I forgot to tell John on the Isle of Patmos.

Or I forgot to tell Elijah just before he shattered all those priests. It's all down here. For us, upon whom the ends of the age have come. But with patience they endured. I didn't count it, but one of the key words in Hebrews is they endured.

They endured. They endured. There used to be a song when we were youngsters in Scotland that one of the guys used to sing it often. Keep right on to the end of the road. And somebody said that's what the epistle to the Hebrew is.

Keep right on to the end of the road. It's there at the end of the road. But let me look for a minute. Let's look at in Luke chapter 17. Luke 17, 26. As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the day when the Son of Man comes.

Listen, they ate. They drank. They married wives. Why does it say the next thing? They married wives and were given in marriage. Do you know what one translation says? They exchanged wives. They weren't loyal to one wife.

They exchanged wives. A thing very common in the day in which we live. And they did that till Noah entered into the ark. And the flood came and destroyed them all. Right to the very last meeting. Some bride is coming out of a building and suddenly somebody says, Hey, look what's coming down the road.

A wall of water. And right after the marriage she's swept away. Then in the next verse it says, verse 28,. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot. They did eat. They drank. They bought. They sold.

They planted. And they built in. Well, isn't that what we're crazy about now? Go... What did somebody call Dallas? The city of what? Cranes or something. Everywhere you go there's a crane on top of a building.

They've already a million surplus square feet of office space. And they're rushing millions more. Until the very day Noah entered into the ark. Nothing disturbed them. Until the flood came. Or in the case of Lot, until fire rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

The Patience and Longsuffering of God

Let's look here a minute in the first epistle of Peter. Where is that? First epistle of Peter, chapter 3. And verse 18 says, Christ also hath once for all suffered for sins that just for the unjust that he might bring us to God.

Being put to death in the flesh but quickened by the Spirit, by which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison, which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of the Lord. You see that?

The longsuffering of the Lord. A hundred and twenty years. A million and a half hours. He looked for at least one heart to turn toward God and they didn't. They're like our day. They were mesmerized by materialism.

Totally lost in materialism. They bought, they sold, they planted, they built it. And it gets increasingly worse. You can have earthquakes in California. You can have an earthquake in the stock market.

What difference does it make to people? They don't get a hell of means. I noticed churches around here. I think it was terrible. Going into Lindale, the Baptist church. Tomorrow night having a special celebration at the Baptist church.

Halloween. TV showed the picture in the news of, what do you call it, Green Acres. Saturday night. Big Baptist church. The wealthiest Baptist church in town having Halloween party. Why didn't they want to glorify the devil?

And yet they do. And this wickedness is spreading the earth tonight. We don't need Russia to destroy us. We'll destroy ourselves before long. These people, these sodomites. I talked with a doctor today that Brother Bracey knows.

And in the course of talking, I said, well the conditions are getting worse. He said that a doctor in the town where he lives was indicted in the court today. A doctor, a brilliant qualified doctor was indicted for sodomy with a child.

Can you think of a man studying all those years to get a degree? Can you think of his daddy and mummy putting all the money behind him that their son may become a distinguished surgeon or physician? And then for a few minutes pleasure and cursing the life of a boy?

His wife's heart is broken, his parents' hearts are broken, his life is damaged. For the rest of his life he's a vagabond. He's marked. I'll tell you what, lots of these guys didn't believe the Bible.

They're beginning to realize the wages of sin is death. All you have to do, these guys get AIDS and they find out it's very, very real. And yet we're back in that same condition today. But who cares? Who cares?

Who preaches righteousness? No other preacher of righteousness. Why was Abel slain? Because he was righteous. And the most horrible thing you can have in a factory today is a righteous man or a righteous woman it seems.

Because he won't participate in all the corruption that's round about him. He stands out very clearly. His light shines so distinctively. And yet despite these facts the generation we live in is not repentant.

The Judgment of God and the Witness of Noah

Let's look at the second epistle of Peter. In chapter 2 and verse 5. Or verse 4, pardon me. If God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness.

You know, I was taught that the angels that fell from heaven are the evil spirits up in the sky. That's not true. The angels that fell from heaven have been chained in hell ever since they fell. I don't know where the other demons came from.

I asked Gracie after the meeting. The angels are chained. You know, the more I read of this the more I see the paralysis of the church today. OK, let me read from verse 5. He spared not the old world but saved Noah, the eighth person, the preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly, turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an example of those who after should live ungodly, and delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.

But I don't read it in anything about him. It vexed him, it troubled him. But when those dirty people came to beat his door down, he was prepared to give his daughters away to men who had lived their filthy homosexual lives.

Verse 9 says, the Lord... Oh, verse 8. It vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds. The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation and to reserve the unjust until the day of judgment to be punished.

But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise government, presumptuous are they, self-willed. They are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries. Whereas angels, with a greater power than might, bring not a raving accusation against them before the Lord, that these, as natural brute beasts made a token, may be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.

You see, the church, it's so simple and yet it's so profound. The church is supposed to be what? Salt. What does salt do? Stop corruption. Is the church doing that? No, the world is corrupting the church.

The longer we spare time, the more dirty the so-called bride becomes. I don't believe the church is the bride. I believe there's a called-out number of the bride. Paul says, I want to attain by any means the out-resurrection.

It's going to be resurrected. What does he mean, the out-resurrection? The holy dead? No, they're going to be resurrected. The holy dead first and finally, the final judgment. But I want to attain the out-resurrection from the dead.

By any means. I don't care what it cost me. What could it cost me more than he had? He died daily. His back had been skinned 195 times with a lash. He'd been in weariness, in fastings, in painfulness, in tribulation, in perils amongst false brethren, in perils.

And he goes on amongst all that kind of... And yet there's one thing I'm striving for. Not to make heaven, but to be in the out-resurrection. The Y1 folk have a book called the Anastasis. David got on a plane the other day in New Zealand.

A fellow came up and said, Hi David. And it's the captain of the Anastasis. Anastasis, he was coming over here. By the way, I'm warning you, I'll be preaching at Y1 on Sunday night. Bracey's preaching in Gilmore, so everybody go to Gilmore Sunday night.

And if you can't go, remember to pray for him. But, you know, it's terribly critical. We blame everybody for the mess that we're in. The only reason we're in this mess is, the reason the world's going to hell-fire, because the church has lost Holy Ghost fire.

The Work of an Evangelist

You know, I said to somebody on the phone today, you know what? I've read over and over again where the apostle says, do the work of an evangelist. Well, what's the work of an evangelist? Boy, I read this, was it middle of last night.

Let me read what the work of an evangelist is. And tell me if you know one. Here we have it, sorry. Acts chapter 8, verse 2. Devout men carried Stephen to his burial and made a lamentation over him. Saul made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and hailing men and women and committing them to prison.